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This short novel, set in Lagos, Nigeria, is constructed from a series of brief chapters, each individually titled, and narrated by a nurse named Korede. The opening chapter is the briefest:
WORDS
Ayoola summons me with these words - Korede, I killed him.
I had hoped I would never hear those words again.
But sadly, Korede will and more than once.
In the next and longer chapter "Bleach," Korede sounds more like a harried housewife or a house cleaner annoyed with the lack of consideration shown by her employers. She is efficient and detailed. If you need someone to clean up following a murder, Korede is certainly the one to call. But as this short book briskly continues, the reader is gripped not by the technical details but by what is revealed about the relationship between Korede and her baby sister Ayoola, who fits the Google definition of "serial killer" (Korede looked it up) and who does not seem to be able to stop herself from offing the various men who are hopelessly in love with her.
As Korede sees it, compared to her younger sister, she is unattractive - too thin, too plain - and men looking at her see her as a prospective excellent wife - for someone else. Ayoola, on the other hand, exudes sexual promise. She appears to cast a spell over every man she meets, one they are incapable of escaping. It doesn't matter who they are - well-off business man, gifted poet, quiet, competent doctor - they all fall for Ayoola and before long they will literally fall to the knife she carries.
Korede has been painfully conscious of her inadequacies since her school days, when the boys
...would draw pictures of girls and exaggerate their best or worst features and tack them on the school notice board for the world to see — at least until the teachers took the pictures down, tearing them from the pins, an act that left a little shred of paper stuck like a taunt....When they drew me, it was with lips that seemed to belong to a gorilla and eyes that seemed to push every other feature out of the way.
Still Korede is very far from hating her sister. On the contrary, she remains protective of her to the point of doing her best to assure she is never caught for her various murders. The reason for this loyalty is never completely revealed, but readers can work out several powerful scenarios for themselves. Still, Korede will be sorely tested when Ayoola takes up with Tade, a doctor whom Korede loves both deeply and secretly.
There is another threat to Ayoola's security as well. Korede has been unburdening herself to one of her patients, a man in what has been termed a persistent vegetative state. But one day he begins to recover and, in time, remember what Korede has been saying.
All in all, Oyinkan Braithwaite evokes a basketful of familiar crime fiction themes - sibling rivalry, serial killing, even the currently fashionable apparently comatose but still aware patient, and does nothing you expect with any of them. Instead, she enlists readers on Korede's side, whether they want to be there or not, and implicated in the same moral dilemma she faces. Additionally, she offers a lightly sketched but evocative portrait of Lagos itself and of the degree to which the city also plays a part in Ayoola's homicidal success.
One thing she does not do is excuse Ayoola on the grounds that the men she disposes of were asking for it. As men go in a toxically male-dominant culture, they seem relatively harmless. One was a poet of some talent, another, Tade, is a gentle soul who sings to the children so they won't be afraid of an inoculation. The menace they present to Ayoola is evidently not individual but generic and its source is implied but not detailed. But they all have one thing in common. Confronted with Ayoola's charms, they lose all reason.
MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER is a remarkable book. At a time when crime fiction often reaches in excess of 400 pages, it barely clears 200. Nevertheless, it involves the reader from the first page, less through the usual hooks of crime fiction - suspense, tension, and the like (though they are there and working) but by presenting us with an intriguing situation and allowing us to come to our own moral conclusions at the end of it. Mordantly funny and deadly serious at the same, it is an exciting discovery.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2019
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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